It’s cool to be published, and read, internationally. The internet makes journals seem as if they are everywhere, but their editors are situated in specific places. Here is fiction from The Barcelona Review, edited by an American living in Barcelona —and seemingly stuck in Florida early in the pandemic —and poetry from the Irish journal, Dodging the Rain. This month’s newsletter, in honor of Spring, is free for everyone.
The Barcelona Review is a modern, international, multi-lingual, online journal founded in 1997 as three separate reviews (English, Spanish, Catalan) for unpredictable stories that are well written. The editor, Jill Adams, publishes short stories, stand-alone novel excerpts, and articles/essays related to the world of books and writing. On the one hand, she says she is open to all genres and writing styles and on the other, warns that tales, vignettes, fables and re-worked fairytales will not interest her. I’ve read this journal over several years and often the stories have strong voices, humor, and a socio-political element. Send one story 5,500 words or fewer to her email address, or through the post to Barcelona, Spain. While there is no payment, a Spanish translation can sometimes be offered. Although she introduces each story on the home page with a single inviting sentence, such as “We begin with Landfall, a gripping speculative piece by Alicia Oltuski, which envisions a tweak in the physical world that affects a small segment of the population; namely, those wasting away from eating disorders,” Adams expects writers to read a few stories before submitting work to get a feel for her interests. I think you will find it is easy to read all five in issue #106, four by Americans, one by a British author. Let me introduce you to two of them.
Although I have read these stories through, I am giving you a snippet of each, starting with what writing style the editor seems to be attracted to, and finishing with a suggestion of where the stories might be headed. “A Car of Her Own,” by Bob Johnson, who has twice before had stories in TBR, is a close third-person, domestic story with an exasperated, teenaged daughter, Charity, and her talkative, widowed mother, Faith—names that seem likely to pitch them into uncharitable, faithless territory—set mostly in a family car driven by Faith and headed to the Monet exhibit in Chicago, on a snowy highway in November. Enter a salesman Faith asks to join their table at a diner, who Charity thinks is creepy, and his act of sabotage in the parking lot. Johnson portrays the characters in immediate, mild conflict, increasing the treachery and resourcefulness of his characters, while mixing in humor to get their frustrations just right.
Another close third-person, domestic story, with a mother and daughter, is “For Immediate Release,” by Becky Tuch, who runs on this platform the incredible bi-weekly Lit Mag News resource. Within what might have been two pages, Tuch establishes a miscommunication that drives the relationship between a reticent-to-share, 23-year-old Naomi and her tech-challenged mother, Chandra, cryptically emailing from a yoga retreat. Her prose is detailed, and dependent on conversations between the characters who do not allow communication. The title refers to a press release Naomi, a gallery assistant, must write to attract visitors to an art performance she is railroaded into participating in by Dolors, the brazen Catalan artist nearer to her mother’s age, and Marcus, her boss.
Both stories start in a confluence of three particular story elements—setting, character, and language—within the first few short paragraphs. The use of language is through dialogue in both, and misspelled email messages, in Tuch’s. Both draw upon a social or cultural issue which I will let you identify when you read the rest of the stories.
Dodging The Rain is an international online poetry journal founded in Galway, Ireland by Master of Arts students from two universities in 2016, and currently edited by one of them, Neil Slevin. He writes that he is interested in “first-person poems with intense or unreliable narrators, third-person poems that are remarkably precise, and poetic experiments that will surprise and/or engage our readers.” The journal is open year-round for submissions and content is updated monthly.
To see how Slevin’s interests manifest, we can look at three poets and four poems. There are two poems under the heading, “Decades of Longing,” by Victoria Nordlund, identified in her bio as “a Dodging the Rain regular.” One is in second person, the other in first, each about childhood, and the second one, “I Turned Thirteen,” comes with a sensitivity warning. The first, “Silly Putty,” is an anecdotal poem set at Six Flags in the speaker’s childhood memory, while the second tells its story through a catalogue of increasingly scary or uncomfortable future events that already happened. The speaker closely observes and contains what she describes. A distant approach is employed in “February 3rd, 1959,” by Chris Pellizzari, where the actions of the weather and disrupted cornfield tell a story about the aftermath of the crash that killed Buddy Holly, and other musicians, and end with Holly’s displaced glasses: “They are unaccustomed to snow./They remember the arid high plains of Lubbock,/the dust bowl sand storms against/the boy’s window…”. Then there is the sonnet, “Meeting the Cailleach,” by Bob Beagrie, a close, physically described poem referencing the Gaelic myth of a divine ancestor, or hag, that created the landscape and weather. The first two poets are Americans, the third is British.
There are many more literary journals in other countries that I will visit in later newsletters. I hope you found inspiration to send your stories and poems abroad.